Pine Bush not the folly; landfill expansion is

I read with amazement the letter from Albert Paolucci that suggests dismantling the Pine Bush Preserve and expanding the landfill (“Pine Bush Preserve remains a folly,” Sept. 2). It seems he is not joking but entirely serious.

Does he know how hard some dedicated people worked to save the small scrap of pine bush that we still have? Now he says their farsighted vision of preserving a piece of this unique ecosystem is just a “folly.” He would have us continue our wasteful lifestyle, whatever the cost, to avoid the inconvenience of making

any changes. In a weird contradiction, he would set aside an even smaller area to save the Karner Blue butterfly, but not the ecosystem itself.

There are many things we can do. How about taking reusable shopping bags into every store not just the grocery store? Or never, ever buying another bottle of water, when we have the nation’s best water here in the Northeast, ready to fill our reusable water bottles from the tap? Or backyard composting, which can accept not just food waste but also our shredded

office paper and grass clippings and turn them into productive garden soil? To really think outside the box and start something new, how about taking our own reusable takeout containers when we go out to dinner?

The old maxim of “reduce, re-use, recycle” still holds, and there are always new and imaginative ways to apply it.

But expanding the landfill is a shortsighted answer. When that expansion is full, where do we find the next one? Worth Gretter Menands